The gold/silver price ratio remains extraordinarily high at 73.
NAV premiums are thin, which is a bit of a change from their more deeply negative trend.
In general, people with whom I speak seem discouraged, disheartened, tempted to hide in apathy and meaningless diversions. Those who promote reform see the monolith of a corrupted governance spoiled by big money that seems impenetrable. Truth is hidden and whispered, with lies and deceptions abounding.
It can be discouraging indeed, to see the sense of duty and honour so poorly treated in this triumph of the age of greed. There is a temptation to see ourselves at some low point, lower than those who have gone before us, and then to wallow in apathy and inaction, in a kind of a sick hopelessness that 'nothing can be done.'
But this is where a sense of history and of human nature can provide to us a great comfort and encouragement to continue on. Liberty and the hopes and aspirations of the common people are always rising and falling, as is the rise and fall of wickedness, and the darker powers of this world that at times would seem to block out the very light.
And yet if we have read and understood what our fathers and mothers, and our grandfathers and grandmothers and those who went before them faced, it does not seem so terrible now, not at all.
The difference is that now is our time to take up the reins of humanity, and stand and work and wait for the inevitability of the human spirit to rise once again, if we will only continue on in our struggle and endure with hope and faith in ourselves and a higher power that arcs, if slowly but faithfully, towards justice.
And perhaps we might remind ourselves that we have not lost, we can have a personal victory that matters, if we can maintain the spark of love in our hearts. And bear in mind that the struggle is never over in this world, but that our own struggle only will be over when we go to our final rest, and hand over the instruments of our warfare to those who come after.
This is the nature of the world and of our humanity, always winning and losing, rising and falling. At long last, the world will pass away, and does not matter. Money is necessary, but it is not the end of the game. Power will not sustain our soul when we are stripped naked. These are not winning, they are snares and traps. What matters is how we have lived and loved, and what we bring with us when we finally face the last.
So despite these failings and misgivings, despite the short term triumphs of those who would use the body politic as their personal servant, and harness the moneys of the world as their new armies for plunder and colonization, we might, with some eye to history, take courage in the words of the great lights of history who shine across the ages for us like beacons. As William Gladstone said in the fight for
voting rights for the common people:
"You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and with the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb-- those great social forces are against you; they are marshaled on our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at some moments it may droop over our sinking heads, yet soon again will float in the eye of heaven, and will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant victory."
William E Gladstone, Representation of the People Act Speech, 1866
